Halb Wessen und Halb-Ding

Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

Cover: Kraftwerk, The Man Machine (Germany: Kling Klang, 1978) 

DYSTOPIAN societies are, for me, extremely provocative and I find myself frequently drawn towards film works based around them. Despite this, I have read relatively few books about dystopias. I believe a well written dystopian society can speak for itself without the need for voice pieces to constantly eulogise about what is right or wrong about it. For the most part, a film is usually long enough to construct a backdrop sufficiently detailed enough to be compelling, but not quite long enough for there to be any lengthy treatments of assumed philosophical issues.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in many ways, is a text that has not aged very well. Things like rocket helicopters, enormous card-indexes and, the mere two billion people that make up the world population are all rather minor considering the rapid advent of computers and environmental awareness. However, certain ideological issues raised in the novel seem a little more ambiguous than I think they would have appeared in their day.

The Fordian ‘T’ which is created by cutting the tops of crosses off, as well as the amusingly named “Charing T” building immediately tell the reader that one religion has been suppressed for the sake of another. Though the suppression of a belief system is unequivocally bad the novel seems to imply mankind has an implicit need for religiosity. In Chapter 17, Mond unequivocally states that:

God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. - Brave New World, Chapter 16

It is not that there is something wrong with his statement – Mond is discussing civilisation purely in terms of the World State and John’s naïve belief system has him addressing different deities from different religions during the same prayer on several occasions. The problem with this is that the novel depicts Malpais and London as opposing one another – Malpais is savage, where London is civilised. The implication seems to be, that society should be in a state of equilibrium somewhere in between these two. It is implied that Malpais could become more savage – it still contains the works of Shakespeare for instance, though they are mouse-eaten. It is also implied that the World State, that our future London, could become more civilised.

            God does not lose its place at any point along the line of civility drawn between these two places. Fordism seems as important to the inhabitants of London as the nameless religion of the inhabitants of Malpais. Mond talks of people finding God after they hit late life and their passions begin to cool and John speaks of people finding God in the grip of these desperate and solitary passions – and Mond even implies an absence of God, though there is never an absence of religion. Part of the point seems to be that God is a person with whom one has a personal, solitary connection with, whereas socially man has no need for a God. This polarisation seems to decry any notion of a socially constructed God, or indeed a personal Godless religion. The novel’s attempt to create two artificial standpoints and then to debate both sides of the argument is particularly limiting here in that while it is talking about marginalisation and suppression, it is only yet accepting the majority and major minority as its standpoints. Is it a problem with the limit of the scope of the plot, or the inherent complicacy of creating and involving more viewpoints?

Aside from this, certain techniques used by Huxley stood out greatly from the rest of the quite plain prose. The stylistic overlap between the narrative and the Controller in the first few chapters was something noticed early on as being quite clever. However, the constant reference and quoting of Shakespeare throughout the text made the dialogue and narration very much pale in comparison. Some of the characterisation in the text was quite masterful and Bernard Marx was so pathetically human that he could have been taken out of a Dostoevsky.

The ideas in the novel were and certainly will always be the main strong point of the novel, and almost every aspect of even daily life that Huxley describes is filled with ideas which speak of de-individualisation and consumerism.